Tag Archives: Mahershala Ali

Centuries in the future, Earth has been ravaged by a vague war known as “The Fall.” Most people live in squalor, while the elite live in a sky city named Zalem. A doctor who performs cyber-prosthetic surgery, Ido (Christoph Waltz), discovers in a junkyard of scrap metal the remains of a cyborg. He rebuilds her, calls her Alita (Rosa Salazar), and explains the world to her for our benefit.

For whatever reason, Best Supporting Actor is, year after year, the easiest acting race to predict. It is often narrowed in on one or two candidates long before the Screen Actors Guild announce their awards. The SAGs just act to solidify the already established front-runner.

2019, by and large, shows the same conditions. The race is already narrowed down, and it is not hard to pick a winner before the SAGs even happen. There is always upset potential, but this race is much more predictable than the other categories.

Rather inexplicably, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the best Spider-Man film made to date. It is hard to imagine that an animated film about multiverse theory and multiple incarnations of a single comic book character coming together to fight a rogue’s gallery that is only recognizable to fans would not only be an inspired origin story for Spider-Man, but also be an entirely accessible experience.

Traversing the 2017 Academy Award category of Best Supporting Actor seems like walking through a minefield. Yes, I led you astray on the same category at the Golden Globes, but I think some slack should be cut for me. I mean, who would have guessed that Aaron Taylor-Johnson would upset?

Taylor-Johnson is notably absent from the Oscar running, which should hypothetically make this easier, as the Golden Globes cannot really be factored in. Still, anything could conceivably happen in this race without the SAG award around to give a prediction some evidential backing. Should I stick to my guns and keep the same path I hoed for the GGs, or adjust my choice accordingly?

There is something cautionary about a film that opens with a scene that outlines a superficial context by having every line of dialogue out of the characters’ mouths point to the obvious mores of the day, to the point where a character has to exclaim what year it is to highlight the already obvious irony of their immediate situation.

It is this retrograde rose-tinting of history that plagues Hidden Figures. Morality films such as these often fall into this pitfall, where characters are hyper aware of their situation as if they themselves are looking back as we are. The film is designed around Continue reading Hidden Figures (2016) Movie Review→

The first category of the night at the 2017 Golden Globes was an unceremonious surprise as Aaron Taylor Johnson won Best Supporting Actor over the likes of Jeff Bridges and heavy favorite Mahershala Ali.